But Will I Play in Boise?
Find out on September 16. I’ll be speaking about my book SILK ROAD TO RUIN (due out in stores any second!) at The Egyptian Theater that night.
10th Anniversary Syndication Interview
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There’s a Q&A on the 10th anniversary of my syndication with Universal Press Syndicate here.
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What’s Up in Boise?
Let’s say a cartoonist were to find himself in Boise for a weekend in late summer, maybe in the course of promoting his book and giving a talk. What should said cartoonist do that would be fun, but that the hotel concierge might not know about? What great restaurants and bars and CD stores and book stores and museums and outdoory things should he check out?
chet@rall.com
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Now He IS a Sore Loserman
I got your Joementum right here, Mr. Accessory to Mass Murder.
Yesterday’s primary defeat of DINO Joe Lieberman was great news for the voters of Connecticut, the United States and the Democratic Party, which has finally begun the process of being reclaimed by the ordinary hard-working Americans it abandoned beginning with the rise of proto-DLC centist guv Jimmy Carter and culminating with the pro-war votes of innumerable elected Democrats in recent years.
Anyone who doubts that Lieberman was a Democrat need only consider his decision to run as an independent despite his defeat. So desperate to maintain his position and serve the monied interests of the Bushite Republicans is he that he’s willing to split the Democratic vote and risk electing a Republican instead. His career may be in ruins–his reputation certainly is, for casting vote after GOP vote–but this tack may bring down the party system once and for all.
Funny, I don’t remember liberals weighing in on which candidates Republicans ought to elect in their primaries. Yet Republican-aligned pundits have oh so helpfully suggested that a move left by the party spells defeat in November. Somehow, I doubt that. The Democratic Party lost its soul a while back. Finding it can only help with the electorate.
As for Joe Lieberman, one hopes that he will use the spare time, not to further undermine the Democratic Party that foolishly supported him all these years, but to prepare for the trial for mass murder that will someday confront every politician who voted for two illegal wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, if there is a God.
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Mail Bag
Paul writes about yesterday’s cartoon:
You really, really don’t get it. Take your number 2 [pencil], darken Olmert’s skin. Give him nappy hair and thick lips while you’re at it. Change antisemite to niggerlover. Is the strip still funny?
But the Germans, of all people, can better explain this to you. Go here: http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,429982,00.html
I still think you’re saveable and (usually) love your work.
And it’s good to be loved. Seriously:
Antisemitism is real. To wit: Mel Gibson. (Sorry, but non-antisemites don’t spout antisemitic bullshit when they get drunk.)
The point of my cartoon is that, while some critics of Israel do so because they are antisemites, criticizing Israel does not inherently make one antisemitic. I have serious issues with Israeli foreign policy, yet I admire Israel and despise antisemitism. (Sort of how I hate American foreign policy, yet love America.)
In the analogy that you make, a cartoon called “The Anatomy of Racism” would only work if there were some black-dominated nation whose critics were routinely and automatically accused of racism merely because of that country’s demographics. No one has ever suggested, at least not seriously, that critics of [Zimbabwean President] Robert Mugabe are motivated solely or even partly by racism.
KFI Interview, Rescheduled
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My interview with KFI Radio Los Angeles morning host Bill Handel, will take place:
10:30 am
Monday
in Southern California, listen at 640 AM
Online at kfi640.com (yes, it’s livestreamed)
I’ll be discussing my new book SILK ROAD TO RUIN, about Central Asia. If you thought Iraq was a son of a bitch, wait until the US invasion of Uzbekistan!
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Factchecking Israeli Demographics
Today’s cartoon references the percentage of Israelis who are Jewish. Some correspondents, claiming that Jews account for more than 70 percent of Israelis, take issue with my claim that the split is roughly 50-50. For the record, I relied on this quote from a professor at the University of Haifa for this cartoon:
Today, there are 5 million Jews and 5 million non-Jews. The latter figure is composed of 4.5 million Arabs and the remainder non-Jewish immigrants, mainly from the former Soviet Union, and foreign workers,” he told the Jerusalem Post.
I have read similar statements elsewhere; thus my cartoon.
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SILK ROAD TO RUIN Book Tour
Ernie asks:
Hi Ted. I pre-ordered your book and look forward to reading it. I assume you won’t be at the big Con in Chicago this weekend? Any chance you will be coming through Chicago this fall to sign our books? Thanks.
I have confirmed bookstore appearances in New York and am working on setting up dates on the West Coast at this time. There are, however, no current plans for any appearances in Chicago. If a store, college organization or other group would be interested in having me travel to Chicago (or anywhere else!) to speak about and/or sign copies of SILK ROAD TO RUIN, please contact me at chet@rall.com.
Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?
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This is the book I wanted to write instead of To Afghanistan and Back — everything you ever wanted to know about Central Asia, without having had to attend grad school — but didn’t have time. Five years later, I was able to release my Central Asia brain dump, a book anyone can read cold and come away understanding the importance of the region and why it’s so interesting.
Comprising travelogue, political analysis and five graphic novellas, “Silk Road to Ruin” examines the “New Middle East”–a part of the world the United States is focusing upon more than the Middle East. “Silk Road to Ruin,” featuring an introduction by “Taliban” author Ahmed Rashid, includes 200 pages of essays about everything from oil politics to the wild sport of buzkashi and 100 pages of graphic novel-format comics about each of my five trips to the region.
Elderly Central Asians are starving to death in nations sitting atop the world’s largest untapped reserves of oil and natural gas. Looters are cavalierly ambling around in flatbed trucks loaded with disinterred nuclear missiles. Statues of and slogans by crazy dictators are springing up as quickly as their corrupt military policemen can rob a passing motorist. And on the main drag in the capital city of each of these profoundly dysfunctional societies, a gleaming American embassy whose staff quietly calls the shots in a new campaign to de-Russify access to those staggering energy resources.
CIA agents, oilmen and prostitutes mix uneasily and awkwardly in ad hoc British-style pubs where beers cost a dollar–a day’s pay and more than enough to keep out the locals. In an extreme case of the “oil curse,” wealth is being pillaged by U.S.-backed autocrats while their subjects plunged into poverty. Meanwhile Taliban-trained Islamic radicals are waiting to fill the vacuum.
It is a volatile mix. But does anybody care? Maybe not — but you should.
Transformed by what I saw being done in America’s name and eager to sound the alarm, I went back to remote Central Asia again and again. I returned to visit the region’s most rural mountain villages. He brought two dozen ordinary Americans on the bus tour from hell. I went as a rogue independent and as a guest of the State Department. I came back to cover the American invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11, then went back again. Capitals moved, street names changed and the economic fortunes of entire nations turned on a dime from year to the next, but those changes merely reinforced my belief that Central Asia is really the new Middle East: thrilling, terrifying, simultaneously hopeful and bleak, a battleground for proxy war and endless chaos. It is the ultimate tectonic, cultural and political collision zone. Far away from television cameras and Western reporters, Central Asia is poised to spawn some of the new century’s worst nightmares.
“Ted Rall’s Silk Road to Ruin is a rollicking, subversive and satirical portrait of the region that is part travelogue, part graphic novel. It’s fresh and edgy and neatly captures the reality of travel in the region.” —Lonely Planet Guide to Central Asia
For decades in the 19th century, the world’s superpowers competed in Central Asia in what became known as the Great Game, an epic scramble for influence and resources that still is being played today. Despite the high stakes — including what may be the planet’s largest reserves of oil and natural gas — the competition for the exotic lands between the Himalayas and Russia’s southern border has had remarkably few chroniclers. With ‘Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?’ Ted Rall fills that void with a book that combines fascination with Asian exoticism and the punchy distancing of cartoons and pop-culture irony. Rall is a former investment banker and expert in the harsh but potentially wealthy region known as ‘the Stans.’ His book is an unconventional, provocative and bitterly funny mix of travel diary, tour guide and graphic novel based on the author’s voyages, from Beijing to Turkmenistan through China’s remote Xinjiang region and the oil-rich steppes of Kazakhstan. The resulting collection is a travel book unlike any other. Besides pipelines, snow-capped mountains and Islamic radicals who may have alluded to the 9/11 attacks two years before the fact, Rall encounters along the way corrupt police, bizarre cult-of-personality regimes and the world championship of a sport where players are often killed during matches. —Bloomberg
Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?
Essays and Graphic Novellas, 2006
NBM Hardback (Original 2006 Edition), 6″x9″, 304 pp., $22.95
NBM Paperback (Expanded/Revised 2014 Edition), 6″x9″, 320 pp., $22.95
To Order A Personally Signed Copy of the Hardback directly from Ted:
To Order the Expanded/Revised 2014 Paperback Edition:
